This blog will be updated by his family while he is
gone on his mission for two years to Hungary.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

A Christmas Zone Conference

Sziasztok!!

Sorry this email is a day late, but we had zone conference all of yesterday in Budapest, and our p-day was bumped to today!!

Zone conference was really good. Because it is Christmastime, zone conference was a Christmas one, we only had zone conference the first half of the day and then played some Christmas games that President and Sister Smith organized the rest of the day. It was super fun. Everyone really felt the spirit during zone conference. For Christmas as a mission we are talking about the attributes of Christ as listed in Preach My Gospel (faith, hope, charity and love, virtue, knowledge, patience, humility, diligence, and obedience). The Sister Training Leaders talked about patience, then the Zone Leaders gave a talk about hope, then the Assistants to the President talked about obedience, we had an intermediate hymn, then two senior sisters shared Christmas stories, and finally Sister and President Smith both gave talks. It was really good. At the end of the day we had a white elephant gift exchange. It was fun.

This week everyone in the mission was challenged to give out double-digit book of Mormons. My companion and I (but mostly my companion, since he does a lot more speaking!!) did it!! It was really hard, but we already have one new investigator out of it. We gave out most of our Mormon Könyvék when we were tabeling.

About the new investigator. When we were tabeling, my companion went up to this lady and told her that this book would change her life. She asked if we could help her daughter, because she was sick. We told her that we could come over later. We came over later that week. She lives in a little tiny village outside of town. We got on the bus, but we didn't know when we were getting off, but a lady on the bus happened to be getting off at the same place and she even escorted us all the way to her house. We gave her a Mormon Könyve as a thank you! The lady was actually waiting outside her house. Her daughter has some sort of disorder. She had already read most of első Nefi (first Nephi) but didn't really understand it. We read the chapter from harmadik Nefi (third Nephi) about Christ blessing the children and then told her to read it out loud to her daughter every day. It was a good lesson, and we really felt the spirit. I'm so glad that I have such a great companion!!!!

The lady who came to church last week, came again this week! Later we had a program with her and invited her to say the closing prayer. It was a beautiful prayer, and she started crying in it! After the prayer she said that she was feeling a feeling that she couldn't describe, and Elder Cox told her that it was the Szentlélek (Holy Ghost).

So we don't call people with the title of "brother" and "sister" very much in church. It's reeallly communisty, and everyone here hates communism and Russia. They also don't like Italy, France, and a couple of other European countries. But they do like Austria, the UK, and Germany. I guess that's Europe for you!

So in Hungarian you can turn any noun into a verb and any verb into a noun. Even more freely than in English (because we can kind of do that). But there's a bunch of complicated rules on how to do it. :/ So in church I never play the piano, I just piano. It's not "will you play the piano during choir practice?" It's "will you piano during choir practice?"

Every week I get one more liter of milk than the last week, thinking that it will finally be enough!! But it's never the case! Last week I got five, and the week before I got four, but it's never enough. This week I'm going to get six. Maybe. I do have to carry it all home in a big bag....

Every day when we come home we are both sooooooo tired. That's a good thing, right? Except for the times when we both fall asleep in nightly planning...

So sometimes when we're a little rushed we forget to eat breakfast (which is funny, because we do studies for at least three hours every morning). And sometimes our stomachs grumble at the wrong times. Right now both of our stomachs are grumbling. lol.

It gets dark really early here. Yes part of it has to do with winter and we are a little north, but it's mainly because we are on the verrry end of a time zone. The sun sets at like 3:30 or 4:00 ish. But it rises at a pretty normal time. So we're not going to have long summer nights or anything....